The professional philosopher moves always and only in the rarefied atmosphere of the pure concept. Croce came to philosophy from art and from economics, and he never lost contact with the elementary forms of knowledge and of action. What might be termed as his fundamental discoveries are his definitions of the æsthetic and of the economic principle. On this basis the whole of his thought rests. Without a conception of a truth which is sufficient unto itself, and yet is not logical truth, and of a good which has its own justification, and yet is not moral good, he would have been compelled to maintain by the side of the concepts of truth and of goodness, error and evil as positive realities, or to include the whole of reality within what would have been truth and goodness in a purely verbal sense. In both cases, he would have been unable to make his philosophy immediately adherent to all grades of active consciousness, from the lowest to the highest, and thereby to history. Of these discoveries the one that until now has attracted the greatest attention is that of the pure intuition, and of art and language as expression. But the establishment of the economic principle, that is of the world of nature, of feeling, of passion, as a positive grade of the spiritual process, will probably be counted as Croce's greatest achievement, by those who shall be able to look back on his work with an ampler perspective. It is through it that his philosophy of the spirit, and in this philosophy, the consciousness of our day, has taken possession of that other world, of that persistent transcendance, which we call nature. In this direction lies, undoubtedly, the future course of the thought of an age, to which, in this afterglow of a great conflagration, all problems seem to gather into the one of the subjection to its better and higher self, the utilization for its purer purposes, of its own cumbersome economic body, of its nature and of its passions. [Footnote 1: Filosofia della Pratica, p. 208.] BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Croce's Complete Works form a collection of twenty-eight volumes, in four distinct series, published by Laterza e Figli, of Bari, who are also the publishers of _La Critica_, and of the following collections initiated or directed by Croce: _Scrittori d'Italia, Scrittori Stranieri, Classici della Filosofia Moderna._ We give here a full list of the _Opere di Benedetto Croce_, adding to the title of each volume the year of the last available edition, the years of their composition having already been indicated in the text: _Filosofia dello Spirito_ ("Philosophy of the Spirit"): Vol. I, _Estetica_, 1912. (Translated under the tide of "_Æsthetic_.") Vol. II, _Logica_, 1917. (Translated under the tide of "_Logic_.") Vol. III, _Filosofia della Pratica_, 1915. (Translated under the tide of "_The Philosophy of the Practical: Economics and Ethics._")